Tag: Jessica Chastain

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Film Features Film/TV

Craig Brewer’s Coming 2 America Earns Oscar Nomination

Eddie Murphy stars in COMING 2 AMERICA Photo: Quantrell D. Colbert © 2020 Paramount Pictures

The nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards were announced this morning. Jane Campion’s Western The Power of the Dog leads the list with 12 nods, including Best Picture, Best Director, and acting nominations for Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Coming 2 America, the sequel to Eddie Murphy’s beloved 1988 star vehicle, earned a nomination for Mike Marino, Stacey Morris, and Carla Farmer’s work in Makeup and Hairstyling. The film was directed by Memphian Craig Brewer. Upon its release in January, 2021, Coming 2 America became became Amazon Studios biggest hit to date. You can read the story behind its making in this Memphis Flyer cover story.

Coming 2 America will compete in the Hair and Makeup category against Disney’s Cruella, Denis Villaneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune, the Jessica Chastain-led biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and Ridley Scott’s melodrama House of Gucci. Brewer’s 2005 film Hustle & Flow earned a Best Original Song Academy Award for Three Six Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” and a Best Actor nomination for star Terrance Howard.

Best Picture nominees also included Dune, which earned a total of 10 nominations. Kenneth Brannaugh’s period drama Belfast was nominated in both Best Picture and Best Director categories, as well as Best Supporting Actress for Judi Dench and Supporting Actor for Ciarán Hinds. Adam McKay’s climate change satire Don’t Look Up, another Best Picture nominee, was also listed for Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. Will Smith earned a Best Actor nominee for sports flick and Best Picture nominee King Richard. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 70’s rom-com Licorice Pizza received both Best Picture and Best Director noms, as did Ryuske Hamaguchi’s meditative Drive My Car, which was also Japan’s entry in the Best International Feature category. Steven Spielberg’s re-adaptation of West Side Story made him the first person to be nominated for Best Director in six different decades, while Ariana DeBose was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Anita. Gueillermo del Toro’s carnival noir Nightmare Alley, and Sundance hit CODA rounded out the Best Picture nods.

Elsewhere, Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s story of an Afghan refugee named Amin Nawabi, made history as the first film to ever earn nominations in the Best Documentary, Best Animated, and Best International Feature categories.

The Academy Awards ceremony will be broadcast on March 27, 2022. You can see the full list of nominees at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website.

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Film Features Film/TV

It Chapter Two

Me: Well, I saw the rest of It.

You: The rest of what?

M: It.

Y: Right, what did you see the rest of?

M: It.

Y: What is it?

M: Chapter Two. You know, the sequel to the highest grossing horror movie of all time, It.

Y: Oh, yeah. I forgot about It. It seems like It came out a long time ago.

M: It was only 2017. That’s life in the Trump era.

Y: Huh. Well, how was it?

M: It was okay, I guess. I’ll have to admit, I thought the first one was overrated, even though I know most people don’t agree. It made $700 million domestically! There were some good performances, like Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh, the lone girl in the group of teenage friends who call themselves the Losers. They live in the small town of Derry, Maine, which, it turns out, has a kind of Hellmouth situation.

Y: You mean like Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

M: Not exactly. It was built on the site where an ancient evil crashed to Earth from the sky, presumably from space. Now it’s haunted by Pennywise, a demon who looks like a clown who dances and sings little songs.

Y: A clown, huh? That doesn’t sound so scary.

M: The clown eats children.

Y: Huh.

M: Also, it sometimes takes the form of a semi-humanoid spider thingy. And it knows your worst fear and will taunt you with it before it eats you with its thousand-toothed maw.

Y: That’s messed up.

M: That’s Stephen King for you. It’s based on one of his most beloved novels.

Y: What’s it called?

M: It.

Y: Right. Shoulda seen that one coming. So how does it compare to the book?

M: I don’t know; I never read It.

Y: Not a Stephen King fan?

M: No, I like King just fine. ‘Salem’s Lot was my jam. Vampires crossed with Lovecraftian, New England, existential horror — someone should adapt that one. Shut up and take my money!

Y: Stephen King’s had a lot of movies made out of his books, hasn’t he?

M: He’s the most adapted author in history. The trailer for Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, ran before It Chapter Two. Looked pretty good.

Y: He wrote The Shining, too? That guy gets around!

M: He sure does. He’s got a cameo in It Chapter Two as the owner of a pawn shop, playing opposite James McAvoy as Bill, who grows up to become a horror writer. King was my favorite part of Creepshow, where he played the farmer who gets eaten by meteorite slime. He’s a much better actor than he is a director. You ever seen Maximum Overdrive?

Y: No!

M: Don’t bother, unless you want to see what the product of full-blown cocaine psychosis looks like.

Y: Maybe I do …

M: That’s on you. Anyway, when they’re kids, the Losers have a run-in with Pennywise the clown; afterwards, they make a blood oath to reassemble if he ever comes back. Now, it’s 27 years later, and kids are disappearing in Derry again. Mike (Isaiah Mustafa/Chosen Jacobs) stayed in town, living above the library, obsessed with figuring out how to defeat Pennywise once and for all. He calls the now-grown-up Losers back together. The first film was set in 1989, which means It is kind of like The Big Chill for Gen Xers, only with a demon clown who feeds on your fear. It’s kinda like the Trump era.

Y: That’s a little too real.

M: Yeah. Pennywise the clown is a metaphor for coming to terms with your anxiety and past trauma. That’s what It is about. Fortunately, Bill Hader is in it, as Old Richie, who used to be Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things. Hader saves It from its own increasingly ponderous mythology by basically playing himself. (If you haven’t seen Barry on HBO, it’s a must. He’s brilliant in it.) Jessica Chastain plays Old Beverly, and she’s got that Molly Ringwald haircut, to keep it authentic.

Y: Bottom line: Should I go see It Chapter Two?

M: Sure, if you like It. It doesn’t really hold together as a movie, but if you’re invested in It, you’ll probably dig It Chapter Two, even though it’s really long and a bit of a slog in places.

Y: Is it the best horror movie of the year?

M: No, that would be Us.

Y: Who?

It Chapter Two

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Film Features Film/TV

Film Review: Crimson Peak

My dearest Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston),

It is with heavy heart that I must inform you that I, your wife, am leaving your ancestral home of Allerdale Hall, aka Crimson Peak, and filing for divorce. This may come as a shock to you, but I now think the dissolution of our relationship was inevitable from the start. Maybe when my mother came back from the grave as a hideous ghost and hissed “Beware of Crimson Peak!”, I should have listened to her. Maybe I should have noticed that you look and act just like the evil Norse trickster god Loki. Maybe I missed another opportunity to avert relationship disaster when my rich father Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver) tried to bribe you into leaving the country. But he was such a terrible actor that I was almost relieved when he died under mysterious circumstances. And besides, you needed his considerable fortune to finish the construction of your steampunk machine that will bring the red clay mines underneath your estate back to profitability.

Mia Wasikowska in Crimson Peak

Come to think of it, the weird scheme to create an automated clay-mining machine should have been another red flag. Is there really a huge market for gooey red clay that looks like fake blood? Maybe you could have put that money into fixing up the house instead. I mean, come on. There’s a giant hole in the roof where the rain and snow come in and cascade down into the central stairwell. Sure, it makes for a dramatic scene, and the soft snowdrift did save my life when your sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) tried to kill me, but it’s way past time to put a tarp on it. Between that, the walls that drip blood all the time, and the small army of ghosts that roam the halls (but never have much of an effect on the plot), my lawyer is going to have no trouble convincing the judge that you are forcing me to live in unacceptable conditions.

And then there’s your sister. Lucille is always smiling and courteous to my face, but I get the sense that she’s plotting against me. Perhaps it’s because of the similarities between our relationship and the one between Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains’ mother in the 1946 Alfred Hitchcock film Notorious, what with the poison in the tea and the purloined key and the basement full of secrets and whatnot. But the year is 1901, which means Hitch is just 2 years old and films with actual plots are only now being invented, so you can understand how I would have missed those particular red flags. I guess you live and learn.

I admit I share some of the blame for this fiasco. I guess I was blinded by the splendor of all those puffy-sleeved silk organza nightgowns and crushed velvet top hats. But frankly, my dear Thomas, there are so many holes in our story, I just don’t think it’s salvageable. So we must go our separate ways and hope that next time, director Guillermo del Toro can conjure up a more coherent world for us to live in.

Yours,

Edith Cushing Sharpe (Mia Wasikowska)

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Film Features Film/TV

Zero Dark Thirty

I saw Zero Dark Thirty, Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow’s so-far more discussed than seen portrait of the decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, about a month ago, just before the controversy over the film’s depiction of torture erupted. I left the theater troubled by what happens in the film’s early interrogation sequences but entirely untroubled by the way the film treated this material.

Because I consider the moral obscenity of torture to be sufficient reason for opposition, regardless of disputed claims about its efficacy, I wasn’t bothered by the film’s acknowledgement that this happened and that some operatives wanted it as an option or, depending on your interpretation, its assertion that maybe — maybe — it yielded some measure of actionable return. And what Zero Dark Thirty shows — a CIA detainee at an unidentified black site, water-boarded, put in stress positions, etc. — is unlike other screen depictions of torture. It’s shown with non-exploitative dispassion and subtle audience complicity while also making the interactions feel awfully intimate and human. And it’s informed by what has come immediately before, opening audio from what seems to be a real 911 call from the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Using this material is a nervy choice, but in juxtaposing it with the film’s torture sequences, Zero Dark Thirty implicitly links the practice with vengeance rather than with operational practicality. And that early linkage haunts the rest of the film.

Like The Hurt Locker, the film is a process-oriented depiction of professionals doing dangerous and important work. But where The Hurt Locker‘s bomb unit was depicted via a series of discrete missions, with — notably — larger goals and sense of progress elusive, Zero Dark Thirty has a narrative through-line, following a young, driven CIA analyst, Maya (Jessica Chastain, superbly carrying a heavy load), who is apparently modeled on an actual figure involved in the hunt and who, much like her director, is a woman operating within a male-dominated sphere, fighting to get her bosses to green-light an expensive, risky personal project.

Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth. Bigelow’s visual sense is as assured and commanding as in The Hurt Locker but this time on an even bigger scale.

While Zero Dark Thirty may be an unusually journalistic work of art, it’s still a work of art. The facts are important — and the film’s privileging of a CIA perspective is as worthy of question as its depiction of torture, if not more so — but this is ultimately fiction that’s after a greater truth about what happened in the decade between 9/11 and the killing of bin Laden and what it means. About the seeming necessity of the hunt and the ultimate lack of closure or satisfaction — or even justice? — the outcome provided.

In Zero Dark Thirty, this journey leads from the sobering opening juxtaposition to a compellingly non-cathartic climax at a home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where a SEAL team raid honors men at work while denying easy or simple notions of heroism. It ends with perhaps the film moment of the year (2012 or 2013, take your pick): a grave, spent, profoundly uncertain final image.

Zero Dark Thirty

Opening Friday, January 11th

Multiple locations